LOCATE function [String]

Syntax

Parameters

string-expression-1 The string to be searched.

string-expression-2 The string to be searched for.

integer-expression The character position in the string to begin the search. The first character is position 1. If the starting offset is negative,
the locate function returns the last matching string offset rather than the first. A negative offset indicates how much of
the end of the string is to be excluded from the search. The number of bytes excluded is calculated as (-1 * offset) -1.

Remarks

If integer-expression is specified, the search starts at that offset into the string.

The first string can be a long string (longer than 255 bytes), but the second is limited to 255 bytes. If a long string is
given as the second argument, the function returns a NULL value. If the string is not found, 0 is returned. Searching for
a zero-length string will return 1. If any of the arguments are NULL, the result is NULL.

If multibyte characters are used, with the appropriate collation, then the starting position and the return value may be different
from the byte positions.